A Lonely New Normal

 A friend of mine has just left her current place of employment in a career change ...

Old Fashioned Leaving Gatherings May Be A Thing Of The Past ...

... she had been at that employers for a number of years, in her stints there as an IT contractor. 

So naturally, as she is a popular and attractive girl, she has made a number of friendships, that in normal times would have resulted in a gathering for a few drinks and possibly a lunch as well .... but such is the brave new world we live in, that there were no farewell/good luck cards, no collection, no cakes ... just a few personal email and video goodbyes. 

Its such a shame, but the passing of the office as a place to work for many categories of workers has eradicated for now these practices, and will continue in the future to make work for those people a more distant thing that you do via cameras with strangers, and a much reduced personal connection, other than via the video applications on the Internet. She has now started work at a new company, completely remotely, so will probably not develop any close friendships, and may never even meet her colleagues in person.

How this will work out over the next few years or even decades, its hard to predict, but without doubt if it sticks around for too long, there will be social and economic consequences. Train services may well reduce as daily commuter numbers collapse. 

Covid-19 Has Hit Hospitality Sector Hard And It May Get Worse.

City centres will most certainly lose restaurants, pubs and cafes that relied on the casual footfall generated by city office workers. Indeed recent reports state that there are now 9.7% fewer restaurants to choose from, with the number of mid-market "casual dining" venues having fallen by 19.4%, (the biggest net losses so far have been  in American and Italian restaurants), but in June/July a new wave of closures, as big as the number already seen could occur, as lease rents will then resume when the rules to support the sector are lifted.

But if this practise of remote working had been the standard working practise for the last 30 years for many office workers, it would have altered the whole nature of our society. In the past, indeed right up until the arrival of the passenger carrying trains, and even more so with advent of the bicycle and later the car, most people had lived and worked at home (Shop keepers, Cobblers, Smithies etc), or within walking distance of their place of employment (Farming villages, Miners Villages and Mill Villages etc). 

The average person rarely travelled out of their own locality, perhaps to local markets, or very occasionally further afield to a large centre such as London. Only city dwellers or traders would regularly interact with, or meet and socialise with new people on a daily basis, and would be the most likely to marry someone they hadn't known since childhood.

The world was small for the vast majority, and they usually married local neighbours or members of their larger families. But as the 19th century moved into the 20th, many people started to daily commute more, and for the first time in history working in locations many miles from their homes, or even changing locations entirely, just for work purposes. This social mobility had the most profound impact on our societies in hundreds of years .... now for the first time, many people started interacting with others from many different locations and backgrounds, often people who also lived many miles away. So suddenly people started marrying people whom they would had never met in previous centuries. 

I for one, met three of my girlfriends/partners at my places of work, and none were living anywhere remotely near my then homes, and two of whom, were themselves migrant from other parts of the country, while yet another was a daily commuter from another town. But now, with so many people working 'remotely,' many people now face the closing down of their circle of friends, to something akin to that faced by their ancestors in the 1870's ... they will see people at work via video conference screens at meetings, but develop no personal relationships or friendships outside of email with their fellow workers. 

Relationships that might have led to lifelong friendships or even marriages will never form ....the world will be lonelier for many single people, who may only have had a social outlet through activities after work with their colleagues, and who will now just log and then log off from their homes, without the chance of developing that sort of social activity. Many people currently enjoying 'working from home,' because of the lack of commute etc, are forgetting that they had previously benefited from the advantages of working in an office. 

That their current familiarity with their colleagues, was formed by working with them, interacting with them, and socialising with them ... but that as people retire, change jobs etc, then their replacement will simply become 'faces' on a screen ... as indifferent or anonymous to each other as the cashier at the supermarket is likely to be to most of us. That within a few years, that esprit de corp and connection with ones employers via the colleagues they previously worked beside, and that has developed over many years or even decades, will soon evaporate, and for the new employees, those things will never develop at all. 

Those who call for this to be the new normal are at best short sighted, and at worst simply lazy and selfish .... maybe I am wrong (and I hope I am), but I know that I would have simply hated working in this new normal.